I’m regularly spitting at the screen. My favourite comedian, Billy Connolly referred to his “muesli-covered Radio”, involuntarily pebbledashed each morning, by the outrage he felt at the nonsense being spoken.
I’m doing the same, but at various digital screens.
Politics
Obviously, I don’t live in the UK anymore. However, I’m still British and therefore interested in events there.
Brexit, or rather non-Brexit has gone beyond farce. This isn’t a piece supporting one side of the argument or the other, but whatever side one is, the school playground antics of the last few months have been maddening. Now, an election has been called, with each side certain that they will triumph and be able to force through their own agenda.
I can’t be the only person who has worked out that the campaign will be all about Brexit. Putting aside the blind optimism of zealots on either side, a single issue campaign might result, again, in a split roughly down the middle. Poor old British tax payers will spend millions on an election to get us back to the exact same spot in which we currently languish.
IT
Exhausted with the lunacy of politics, I retreat to work. I sit, surrounded by my beautiful designed, recently updated Apple hardware. Over recent years, Apple has been telling us that the future is in the cloud. Everything that we value, photos, media, and data will live in the loving care of Apple who will protect and cherish it. We will access these treasured resources through any and all of our sleek, expensive devices.
Sign me up!
They did, and I pay them each month for all manner of things. Yet, my data is not syncing. My photos are different on different devices. Applications that used to work, don’t work any more. Apple maintains a dignified silence on these things. All its utterances are passed through a “liability” filter, so at no point will they acknowledge specific issues. Mostly, they tell me to “turn it off and turn it on again”. Again, I find myself spitting at the screen.
The specific issues are not the point. I can cope that my Mac and my iPad have different versions of a note. I can copy them both elsewhere to ensure that I don’t lose anything. However, what else is Apple looking after for me? Oh. Wait. A lot. Really a lot. Copies of important documents, photos, scans, passwords…Apple has a hand in all of them.
What gets me spitting though, is that while users complain of errors in Catalina and IOS, Apple is reporting huge revenues, and launching new and exciting headphones. The CEO is almost certainly spouting some sanctimonious crap about privacy somewhere.
When did mediocrity become OK for Apple?
